The text is a response to, and in some ways an apology for, contemporaneous Marxist theory. The historical failures of Marxist thought having become apparent, Debord and others attempted to reinvent, or at least reinterpret, Marx within the paradigm them obtaining. The text is scholarly and incredibly dense. Indeed, its brevity belies the immense amount of information conveyed and the exceptional information density of the text is one of the primary hurdles to interpretation.